467 Cropton Description and Information | Walks around southern areas of Moors

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467 Cropton Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

A stepping stone to better things

Distance: Eight, or nine miles.

General Location: North York Moors.

Start: Cropton.

Right of Way: Public routes and Forestry Commission open access forest.

Dogs: Legal.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer OL27 North York Moors eastern area.

Date walked: Friday 3 February 2006.

Road Route: Signed north from Wrelton (near Pickering) on the A170.

Car Parking: Roadside.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pubs - The Cropton Brewery at the New Inn. The Blacksmiths Country Inn, Hartoft.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: www.forestry.gov.uk.

Terrain: Hilly, half forested.

Points of interest: Cawthorne Roman Camp nearby.

Difficulty: Quite difficult.

Please observe the Country Code and park sensibly. While every effort is made to provide accurate information, walkers set out at their own risk.

Please click the image below to go to the walking route sketch map and detailed directions, or scroll down to a Google Map of the route, the route description, and an image gallery. Plus you can bookmark this page on your favourite social bookmarking site, and comment on the walk. We hope you enjoy the walk.

Googlemap

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Cropton stands on the southern edge of the North York Moors and is ancient and interesting, its line of stone houses, stone walled gardens, its old chapel, reading room, school and its ex-Well House that drew the water from 300ft underground before it was capped in 1920. Though the village isn’t dry, it has a microbrewery.

The depth of the well corresponds to our descent down Cropton Banks to Cropton Beck and then the River Seven where half a dozen Shetland ponies grazed and many finches and tits rushed about in mixed winter foraging parties

We kept to the valley of the Seven, heading north, walking the line between grouse shooting land on the moor above and pheasant shooting land below. There are also sheep. A drainage ditch had been recently cleared and plastic piped which will help the heather. This is the open part of the walk, a nice track that eventually fades to a path with heather all around and views to Rosedale. Across the valley is the forest we return through.

To get to the trees we hoped to walk the water at the confluence of the Seven with Hartoft Beck. Here there are stepping stones marked on the OS map and we crossed our fingers that they would be useful, otherwise we’d have had to reclimb and push on to the bridge further north.

The stepping stones looked stylish, pointed to cut into the flow, but were slippy, one very so, the water skimming over, paddling would have wetted the knees. So check the weather. Just along is an intensely rust red spring oozing from the black ground.

The forest held the cold of the previous night; not a breath of wind. The conifers are flashed by silver birch; there are many wheelbarrow-sized ant heaps. Tracks took us further north, Driffield students were out in their Red Kite minibus, Hamer Beck ran below, pines towered above, a deer bobbed its white rear.

Then a climb to the forested tops, to the grid of wide crushed limestone tracks and interconnective narrow paths. Now and then, every mile or so or hour, there's a view to the moors otherwise its hard to get your bearings and a satellite navigator complements the compass and OS map.

We found the campsite clearing and continued a downhill run south until the inevitable, the climb back up Cropton Banks which we did on a steep sunken path soft with moss and half light.

Image Gallery

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